Unbroken: Julia von Heinz

After moving to Berlin and the challenges of being both a student and a mother, Heinz’s involvement in the Antifa came to a standstill, but she has stayed firmly and passionately focused on the cause of anti-fascism. She says it took 18 years for “Und morgen die ganze Welt” to finally see the light of day, from its first rejection by a public broadcaster to the Venice premiere in 2020. “Treasure,” her first international production, was more than ten years in the making before coming to fruition, premiering at the Berlinale in 2024. In the meantime, “Hanna's Journey” (2013) and others had been released. Von Heinz calls these three films her “Aftermath Trilogy” because they deal with the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations.

“Eldorado KaDeWe” also belongs to this thematic complex. Hailed by critics as a mini-series that set new standards, von Heinz’s story about the legendary Berlin department store focuses on female biographies, lesbian love, and the violent “Aryanization” of Jewish property. The economic and social history is a vivid parable of our current developments, brought about using anti-nostalgic devices such as modern street scenes in the exterior shots. The Berlin TV tower is already standing when Nazi henchmen raid the Eldorado nightclub. These hauntingly realistic images suggest it is back, or perhaps it never went away.

One of Julia von Heinz’s grandfathers was of Jewish descent and applied for “Aryanization”; the other carefully managed the assets of his Jewish business partner and returned them to him after the war. The theme of homosexuality, on the other hand, may be read as an echo of a discovery Julia von Heinz made after her father’s death – an aloof individual, he hid his love for men throughout his life, even from his own family. Both motifs, Jewish heritage and suppressed queerness, are linked by the overarching question: How can a person remain loyal, even to themselves, under the spectre of violence often invisible but so powerful in its impact? 

Von Heinz explores these questions in the short film “Meine Väter” (Two fathers) and in the collaborative work “Rosakinder” (Rosa’s Children). It must have been tough being picked apart by her teacher Rosa von Praunheim, who regarded her as “spoiled”. But he also “saved” her. When success was slow in coming after her debut “Was am Ende zählt” (Nothing Else Matters) and she fell into a state of deep depression, he encouraged her to show her ideas to a BR editor. The result was the bizarre and moving documentary “Standesgemäß” (Noble Commitments, 2009) about three very different aristocratic women in search of the perfect match. The spell was broken, and her career gained momentum.

The director, who often writes her screenplays together with her husband John Quester, was once accused of “distancing” herself when she described her television work (“Katharina Luther”, the Tatort episode “Für immer und dich”) and the cinema hits “Hanni und Nanni 2” (2011) and “Ich bin dann mal weg” (2015) as “commissioned works”. In conversation, however, she calls them “scripts that came to me,” and says they have been valuable because they helped the “self-taught” filmmaker (von Heinz’s own words), who was rejected eight times by film schools, to finally get recognition as a professional director.